Monday, March 25, 2019

A couple of week ago, the Seafood Expo North America took place in Boston, bringing seafood purveyors from all over the country, like Pacific Seafood who held a special tasting of their products for the media.

Pacific Seafood started in 1941 with one store in Portland, Oregon and has now expanded to 11 states. They focus on delivering fresh and sustainable seafood from the west coast (but also beyond now that they've expanded), like this dungeness crab (which made a great dip). They get their seafood wild caught or from responsible aquacultures.
Pacific Seafood is also big on oysters. 30,000 gallons of oysters are produced a week during peak season. They showed us how to shuck oysters, like the Amethyst oysters that came from Humboldt Bay along the California coast. They also had a meatier Grays Harbor oysters from Washington.

Monday, April 16, 2018

If you haven’t experienced a collaboration before, it is an opportunity to see what is possible when two artists combine their efforts. The effort could involve many creative efforts such as a motion picture, a song, or even a breakthrough in science. I was invited to see a menu collaboration between two entrepreneurs: Mind Fish Co and chef Teresa Montaño.

“Pole-and-line fishing is a centuries-old technique and continues to employ the fishing communities of the Maldives, where their only natural renewable resource is the wild skipjack tuna,” said Mind Fish Co-Founder Jerry Lin. “All our skipjack tuna are pole-and-line caught and processed/packed in the Maldives.”
Lin obtained his masters in Aquatic Biology and wrote his thesis on the Maldives fishing industry. His interest and passion for sustainable seafood grew, which led him to starting Mind Fish, a company that exports canned tuna from the Maldives.
Teresa Montaño was previously the executive chef of Ración which was on Jonathan Gold’s top 101 Best Restaurants. There she prepared beautifully plated Basque and Spanish tapas. She created a Spanish-inspired menu emphasizing sustainability, local ingredients and dishes to share with Iberian wines and beers.
The first was a crostini topped with a whipped goat butter, anchovy and tuna and topped with roasted radishes and fresh herbs.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Last year I attended a Sustainable Seafood panel in LA presented by The Los Angeles Food Policy Council & Sustainable Seafood LA, and I learned a lot about seafood consumption in the US and the world.

Here are some facts about seafood you may not know:

America is the 2nd largest consumer of seafood in the world (the first is China).

We take half a billion pounds of seafood out of ocean each day.

90% of US seafood is imported.

Shrimp is the #1 consumed seafood in US. Most of these are imported from Thailand. The 2nd most consumed is tuna. Pacific blue fin tuna, as you may already know, is depleted. But you can still eat skipjack tuna (which makes up 60% of canned tuna these days), albacore, and yellowfin.

50% of the world's seafood is from aquaculture (mostly from China).

70% of the fish in US is consumed in restaurants. That means chefs play a very important part in seafood sustainability!

2% of all research and development dollars go to USDA. Only 0.4% of that goes to aquaculture research.